Shameful plug time, with help from Live Science:

 Ah, roses. Their heady fragrance and delicate petals glistening with dew could soften the hardest heart.

But take a sharper look at the dewdrops. They bead, rather than spread—and that’s because the material composing the petal surface doesn’t bond well with water.

Yet the droplets don’t roll off. What binds them to the petals?

To find out, a team of chemists led by Lin Feng of Tsinghua University in Beijing peered at the petals with a scanning electron microscope. What they saw was a carpet of minuscule bumps covered with even tinier ridges. To confirm that those structures — and not the chemical makeup of the petals — are what grip the water droplets, Feng’s team made a plastic cast of the petal surface. As with the original petal, water droplets stuck to the cast, even when it was turned upside down.

And the plug? That gorgeous rose photograph is from my website, Photo-Roses.com

LA Times

Birds do it, bees do it, and so, apparently, do … cows?

No, it’s not that. We’re talking about sensing the Earth’s magnetic field.

German scientists using satellite images posted online by the Google Earth software program have observed something that has escaped the notice of farmers, herders and hunters for thousands of years: Cattle grazing or at rest tend to orient their bodies in a north-south direction just like a compass needle.

Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen and their colleagues found that two out of every three animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north.

Ever wished you could have Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? Science, not magic, could make that a reality. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created materials that have the potential to bend light and even redirect it around themselves, cloaking any object behind them. They are metamaterials, materials that gain unusual properties via their structures. While all materials found in nature have a positive refractive index, these man-made metamaterials have a negative one.

Viewing an object through water causes it to appear displaced because of water’s refractive index. A negative refractive index means that displacement is backwards — if water’s refractive index were negative, underwater objects would appear to be out of the water entirely.

Up until now, scientists have only been able to successfully manipulate light wavelengths in two dimensions. Also, previous metamaterials in the optical range had to vibrate at certain frequencies to achieve negative refraction, which resulted in high energy absorption. However, the Berkeley researchers created two new metamaterials that function in a broad spectrum of optical wavelengths with a lower energy loss, consequently allowing them to better achieve negative refraction around three-dimensional objects.

Moonshine?

The moon is once again a popular destination, as several space-faring nations are talking about setting up bases there. One reason would be to mine fuel for future fusion reactors.

The fuel in this case is helium-3, a lighter isotope of the helium used in balloons. In high energy collisions, helium-3 fuses with other nuclei to release more energy and less waste than the reactions in traditional nuclear reactors.

“If we can show that we can burn helium-3, it is a much cleaner and safer energy source than other nuclear fuels,” said Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Just 40 tons of this stuff has enough potential energy to meet the total U.S. electricity demand for a year.  However, there is almost no helium-3 on Earth. The closest supply is on the moon.

Scientific American Mind: 

• The human sense of smell is often seen as insignificant, but this sense is keener and more influential on our species than many people realize.
• Smell subconsciously facilitates a variety of human social interactions. People use smell to assess a person’s likability, sexual attractiveness and emotional state. They can also use scent to distinguish a stranger from a friend, a male from a female and someone who is gay from someone who is straight.
• Deficiencies in olfaction may contribute to social withdrawal, such as that which accompanies schizophrenia.

A tangle of tubes and polyurethane pouches binds a naked man and woman—he, paunchy and unperturbed, she, slim and similarly unself-conscious. This setup is not some esoteric sex game; it’s “Smell Blind Date,” an installation created by artist James Auger on display this past spring in New York City as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. The PVC tubes—which run between the subjects’ chests, with outlets extending to pouches attached to their noses, armpits and genitals—allow the man and woman to inhale each other’s body odor through a wall that divides them. In theory, they are on a truly blind date, each undistracted by the other’s looks, assessing the other’s potential as a mating partner by his or her smell alone.

The human sense of smell is often seen as insignificant, dismissed as a distant also-ran to our keen eyesight or sensitive hearing. But this sense is keener and more influential on our species than many people realize. In particular, as Auger’s fanciful art project illustrates, smell facilitates a variety of human social interactions, both casual and intimate. Indeed, people who lose their sense of smell often gain a new appreciation for its importance [see “When the Nose Doesn’t Know,” by Eleonore von Bothmer; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2006].

I’ve always considered a quick mid-workday nap a “mind reboot.” Now there’s evidence backing me up.

The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day’s information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning.

And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade—perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.

Not Merely Resting
If you find this news surprising, you are not alone. Until the mid-1950s, scientists generally assumed that the brain was shut down while we snoozed. Although German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had evidence in 1885 that sleep protects simple memories from decay, for decades researchers attributed the effect to a passive protection against interference. We forget things, they argued, because all the new information coming in pushes out the existing memories. But because there is nothing coming in while we get shut-eye, we simply do not forget as much.

Then, in 1953, the late physiologists Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago discovered the rich variations in brain activity during sleep, and scientists realized they had been missing something important. Aserinsky and Kleitman found that our sleep follows a 90-minute cycle, in and out of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep, our brain waves—the oscillating electromagnetic signals that result from large-scale brain activity—look similar to those produced while we are awake. And in subsequent decades, the late Mircea Steriade of Laval University in Quebec and other neuroscientists discovered that individual collections of neurons were independently firing in between these REM phases, during periods known as slow-wave sleep, when large populations of brain cells fire synchronously in a steady rhythm of one to four beats each second. So it became clear that the sleeping brain was not merely “resting,” either in REM sleep or in slow-wave sleep. Sleep was doing something different. Something active.

Read it all.

Tom Bunzel :

A truly thought provoking video on TED is headlined: Kwabena Boahen: Making a computer that works like the brain. Boahen is a computer scientist who actually grew up Ghana, where he was fortunate enough to get a computer as a child; in the video he quotes a fellow researcher Brian Eno who said in 1995, “The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.”

Boahen takes that to mean more creative conception of computer hardware, and proposes a restructuring of the CPU along the lines of neural networks to permit more efficient processing of information.

What I find incredible is that neither Boahen, with his fresh viewpoint on computer science from his unique perspective, nor seemingly any of the speakers at TED (with the possible exception of Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My stroke of insight” – a phenomenal investigation of neuroscience of mystical proportions) make any attempt to truly grasp the significance of the analogies between advances in computing and the human brain.

More specifically, if we can use Biblical language allegorically, it seems clear that consciously, subconsciously or indeed completely unconsciously we’ve created computers in our own image.
In my humble opinion, there is deep meaning to this, and indeed the birth of the computer and with it the Internet are major potential milestones in the evolution of our species – perhaps to a Humanity 2.0 – but only if we grasp their essential meaning.

What do I mean?

Read on.

LiveScience:

Scientists exploring caves in the bone-dry and mostly barren Atacama Desert in Chile stumbled upon a totally unexpected discovery this week: water.

They also found hundreds of thousands of animal bones in a cave, possibly evidence of some prehistoric human activity.

The findings are preliminary and have not been analyzed.

The expedition is designed to learn how to spot caves on Mars by studying the thermal signatures of caves and non-cave features in hot, dry places here on Earth. Scientists think Martian caves, some of which may already have been spotted from space, could be good places to look for life.

No hot place on Earth is drier than the Atacama Desert. Many parts of the high-plateau desert have never received rain that anyone can remember. Average rainfall across the region is just 1 millimeter per year. (Parts of Antarctica are considered the driest places on Earth, however.)

John Tierney:

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us, perhaps you’re in the mood for a break, so I’ve rounded up a list of 10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things:

1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then, when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old reliable villain: saturated fat.

But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb, unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated fat.

If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.

2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner.

Read it all. But especially this:

5. Evil plastic bags. Take it from the Environmental Protection Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions — to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.

You still have to worry about idiot politicians. LA just voted to ban plastic bags for environmental reasons.

VIDEO HERE

LA Weekly:

…In the late 1990s, the term “toxic mold” found its way into media coverage and a handful of courtrooms. A few victims reported a frightening array of symptoms, from severe memory loss to infections and bleeding gums.

In a country where fear is second only to sex as a hot sales tactic, household mold, which has always been in the environment, soon became, in Kramer’s words, “toxic, dangerous, a killer.” While mold can be dangerous to the infirm, an opportunistic group of plaintiff’s attorneys convinced juries of an exaggerated threat — to the healthy. Awards by juries in Texas, California, Oregon and several other states exploded into massive figures, topped by $32.1 million the Ballard family of Texas was awarded in 2001 when their home was inundated with mold.

Builders and insurance agents feared that they would have “another asbestos” on their hands, an area of litigation that grew so huge, so vague — and so lucrative for lawyers — that some now refer to it as the “Asbestos Blob.” Construction companies, home insurers, health insurers and contractors decided to fight back against claims of health problems and property damage caused by mold, arguing that there is very little scientific or medical proof that household molds make people seriously ill.

But their side didn’t have Sharon Kramer. With Kramer as its Erin Brockovich and her daughter as a starring victim, a mold war exploded, with California at its center. By 2001, water-damage claims in California — driven by the discovery of mold — skyrocketed by a third, to $430 million of all homeowner-insurance claims paid, according to the Insurance Information Network of California. The average claim surged 80 percent from 1998 to 2001, to $4,730, to remove what, mere years earlier, had often been scrubbed away with a little Dutch Cleanser. The Mold Blob had arrived, and by 2002, insurers reported $3 billion in annual losses nationwide — paid as settlements for personal-injury claims and property damage caused by mold.

One of those demanding justice was Kramer, whose sickly teenage daughter was nearly killed by a household fungus that is innocuous to the healthy. A Realtor in exclusive Rancho Santa Fe, Kramer became an outraged gadfly and self-appointed mold researcher. She grew enraged by papers written by mold experts who sided with insurers and contractors in saying household mold isn’t particularly dangerous.

Like those who would later join the cause, including Johnny Carson sidekick Ed McMahon, she saw a conspiracy funded by businesses out to end mold claims while risking the public’s health. She believed that the well-being of thousands depended on her exposing that deceit. Like the fight waged by McMahon over the death of his dog purportedly from mold, Kramer’s belief has consumed her. It has wiped out her comfortable suburban life and financial security and driven away all but her truest friends.

But the great mold scare never rose to the level of accepted epidemic among serious researchers. Despite public hysteria that continues even now, science today finds no direct link between mold and serious illness in people with normal immune systems.

The Centers for Disease Control now says: “There are very few reports that toxigenic molds found inside homes can cause unique or rare health conditions such as pulmonary hemorrhage or memory loss” — the kinds of illnesses claimed in successful lawsuits at the height of the mold rush. “These case reports,” the CDC warns on its Web site, “are rare, and a causal link between the presence of toxigenic mold and these conditions has not been proven.”

On fields of dreams, the duel between the batter and the pitcher at times assumes aspects of humiliation and farce. And never more so than when a batter misses a pitch, swinging so forcefully as to nearly sprain something. The culprit in such cases is usually either a rising fastball or a so-called drop curveball.

From the batter’s perspective, a rising fastball follows a normal trajectory until it is quite close to home plate, at which point it seems to jump several inches, as if lifted by some mysterious force. A drop curveball, on the other hand, appears to drop straight down right in front of the plate, from twelve o’clock to six o’clock—hence its other name, “12-to-6 curveball.”

Any well-thrown baseball (except a knuckleball, but that’s another story) does have substantial spin that can bend its trajectory one way or another—depending on how it’s thrown—because the ball’s uneven surface creates more drag, or air friction, on one side of the ball than the other. A ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, for example, should drop nearly three feet owing to gravity, yet it falls less than two feet thanks to backspin-generated lift. It doesn’t rise, though. The perceived pop owes a lot to shattered expectations, as does the drop of a curveball.

Discover writes about evolution in action.

Sometimes a species is so complex, so marvelous, or simply so weird that it’s hard to imagine how it could have possibly evolved by natural selection. Among the weirdest is the flounder.

Not many animals would be at home in a world made by Picasso, but the flounder would fit right in. It belongs to a group of fish called flatfish, or pleuronectiforms, that all spend their adult lives hugging the sea floor, where they ambush smaller fish. Flatfish are teleosts, a huge group of fish species that include more conventional creatures like trout and goldfish. While they have a lot of teleost anatomy, flatfishes also have some bizarre adaptations for their life at ninety degrees. All vertebrates, ourselves included, use hair cells in the inner ear to keep ourselves balanced. In most flatfish species, the hairs have rotated so that swimming sideways feels normal to them. Many flatfish can camouflage the upward-facing side of their body. The underside is pale, and in many species the fin is tiny.

And then, of course, there are the eyes.

Read on.

Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, argues they are not.

An interesting collection of photographs.

UCLA researchers discovered that an FDA-approved drug reverses the brain dysfunction inflicted by a genetic disease called tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). Because half of TSC patients also suffer from autism, the findings offer new hope for addressing learning disorders due to autism.

Using a mouse model for TSC, the scientists tested rapamycin, a drug approved by the FDA to fight tissue rejection following organ transplants. Rapamycin is well-known for targeting an enzyme involved in making proteins needed for memory. The UCLA team chose it because the same enzyme is also regulated by TSC proteins.

“This is the first study to demonstrate that the drug rapamycin can repair learning deficits related to a genetic mutation that causes autism in humans. The same mutation in animals produces learning disorders, which we were able to eliminate in adult mice,” explained principal investigator Dr. Alcino Silva, professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Our work and other recent studies suggest that some forms of mental retardation can be reversed, even in the adult brain.”

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

VIDEO HERE.

Meteorite arrives with DNA material.

I’d like to believe this…

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

A new study shows how sounds are amplified in the inner ear, a finding that could explain how hearing loss can result from genetic mutation or overdose of drugs.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital investigators have found that an electrically powered amplification mechanism in the cochlea of the ear is critical to the acute hearing of humans and other mammals. The findings will enable better understanding of how hearing loss can result from malfunction of this amplification machinery due to genetic mutation or overdose of drugs such as aspirin.

Sound entering the cochlea is detected by the vibration of tiny, hair-like cilia that extend from cochlear hair cells. While the cochlea’s “inner hair cells” are only passive detectors, the so-called “outer hair cells” amplify the sound signal as it transforms into an electrical signal that travels to the brain’s auditory center. Without such amplification, hearing would be far less sensitive, since sound waves entering the cochlea are severely diminished as they pass through the inner ear fluid.

LiveScience compiled a list of articles from their archives about the human race. If you’re curious about why your hair parts or you pass gas, among other things, this is your chance to learn.

Scientific American

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.

Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. That is emphatically not to say that explicit prejudice and discrimination have evaporated nor that they are of lesser importance than implicit bias. According to a 2005 federal report, almost 200,000 hate crimes—84 percent of them violent—occur in the U.S. every year.

The persistence of explicit bias in contemporary culture has led some critics to maintain that implicit bias is of secondary concern. But hundreds of studies of implicit bias show that its effects can be equally insidious. Most social psychologists believe that certain scenarios can automatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior. “The data on that are incontrovertible,” concludes psychologist Russell H. Fazio of Ohio State University.

Glad to clear this up.

Yuval Levin:

A casual observer of American politics in recent years could be forgiven for imagining that the legitimacy of scientific inquiry and empirical knowledge are under assault by the right, and that the left has mounted a heroic defense. Science is constantly on the lips of Democratic politicians and liberal activists, and is generally treated by them as a vulnerable and precious inheritance being pillaged by Neanderthals.

“For six and a half years under President Bush,” Senator Hillary Clinton told an audience in October 2007, “it has been open season on open inquiry.” Senator Edward Kennedy, in an April 2007 speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bemoaned the many ways in which “the truth is taking a beating” under conservative influence in Washington. One popular recent book on the subject is entitled The Republican War on Science; another, by former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore, is called The Assault on Reason.

But beneath these grave accusations, it turns out, are some remarkably flimsy grievances, most of which seem to amount to political disputes about policy questions in which science plays a role. Ethical disagreements over the destruction of embryos for research are described instead as a conflict between science and ignorant theology. Differing judgments about the proper role of government in sex education in schools are painted as a quarrel between objective public health and medieval prudishness. A dispute about the prudential wisdom of a variety of energy policy alternatives is depicted as a clash of simple scientific facts against willful ignorance and greed.

And the countless minor personnel and policy decisions that always shape the day-to-day operations of the federal executive branch are pored over in an effort to reveal a nefarious pattern of retrograde anti-rational obscurantism. The president’s science advisor, it seems, now has an office located a little further from the Oval Office than his predecessors had, and a member of a Food and Drug Administration advisory board once wrote a book about his religious conversion.

The American right has no desire to declare a war on science, and nothing it has done in recent years could reasonably suggest otherwise. The left’s quixotic defensive campaign against an imaginary enemy therefore has little to tell us about American conservatives—who, of course, do have a complex relationship with science, though it is not the one the left seeks to describe.

But if this notion of a “war on science” tells us little about the right, it does tell us something important about the American left and its self-understanding. That liberals take attacks against their own political preferences to be attacks against science helps us see the degree to which they identify themselves—their ideals, their means, their ends, their cause, and their culture—with the modern scientific enterprise.

New Mexico governor Bill Richardson seemed to speak for many when, in a speech in the course of his ill-fated campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he called upon Democrats to make theirs “the party of science and technology.” This is a more positive (not to say less paranoid) way of expressing the deep connection between science—understood both as a way of knowing and a means to doing—and the agenda of liberalism and progressivism.

Read on.

Chris Weinkopf writes about Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled:

…a searing satire whose critics have largely failed to recognize it for what it is. Instead, they fume over what they perceive as Stein’s unfair treatment of them.

They resent, for example, that Stein’s movie repeatedly associates the unequivocally godless with images of the Berlin Wall, the USSR and even Josef Stalin. They protest the suggestion that evolutionary absolutism poses a dire threat to America’s most-cherished rights. And they decry Stein’s charge that Darwinist thinking led - and naturally leads - to evils like eugenics and Nazism.

Which is to say, they miss the point.

Stein’s film is part parody of, part rebuttal to, the crusading atheists who have risen to prominence in recent years - such as Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. And it employs the same nasty tactics they have perfected.Is it unfair to liken all Darwinists to communists? Of course, but no less so than likening all believers to al-Qaida and the Taliban - a popular trope among the New Atheists.

Is it a stretch to argue that academia’s hostility toward skepticism about the Gospel of Darwin imminently imperils freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom itself? Certainly. So is the claim that scientists who detect hints of design in their research are “anti-science,” and that those who resent the teaching of atheist dogma as fact in public schools are attempting to impose a “theocracy” on us all.

And yes, it’s a cheap shot to pin the wickedness of Adolf Hitler on Charles Darwin’s writings from a century earlier. But, then, so is blaming every abuse committed in the name of God on religion itself.

For 90 minutes, “Expelled” puts its targets in the same uncomfortable, unfair position in which believers have long found themselves in academia and the media. In turning the tables this way, the movie reveals, cleverly and amusingly, that you don’t need to believe in God to be a zealot.

And zealots of any stripe cannot tolerate mockery, nor do they understand when they’re being satirized. 

Attach cameras to elephant trunks. Get great photos.

We revealed the amazing story of how four tiger cubs were captured on special cameras in logs carried by elephants - giving the most intimate insight into their early lives ever recorded.

Now, we show for the first time other creatures of the jungle caught in this extraordinary - and pioneering - way.

Cheeky langur monkeys, a rare sloth bear, spotted deer and a leopard with her cub are just some of the other animals that film-maker John Downer came across in his fascinating experiment.

Because it’s fun?

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.

Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks.

Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species.

We won! That is, the forces of science-based public health policy seem to have won – if not the war, at least a major battle. At long last, federal risk assessors and regulators have come around to the view that administering chemicals to rodents in super-high doses does not reliably predict human risk — of cancer, or anything else — and that a better method needs to be employed, if we are to avoid more unnecessary bans, anti-chemical media hysteria, and activist crusades.

High dose animal tests on one rodent species don’t reliably predict cancer risk in another rodent type, much less in humans. The same tests for “carcinogens” that are used to condemn synthetic chemicals also give false positive findings for a whole spectrum of natural substances that we safely eat, breathe, and drink every day.

The sort-of good news is that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just announced a new collaboration: the development of a “new paradigm” for testing potentially toxic chemicals. Drawing upon the unique testing methodologies to be found in their various sub-agencies, they plan to shift from testing chemicals on whole animals to testing the chemicals on cells and “isolated molecular targets,” using high-speed, automated screening robots.

According to media headlines last week, a new study linked white bread and sugary foods to cancers and disease. Another study, which didn’t make headlines, reported that such foods were not associated with cancers. The data in both studies actually showed the same thing. Which conclusions do we believe?

The idea that sugar feeds cancer, if it was true, would understandably terrify anyone. It is this belief, though, that has helped to feed fears of refined sugars and flours and other ‘bad’ carbohydrates.Recent stories circulating the internet and media have led many people to think that concerns over sugars are real and that they come from upstanding doctors at prestigious institutions. No one can blame them for believing sugar is linked to cancer. There are more than one million websites (a stunning 1,080,000 by last count) capitalizing on this fear and virtually none offering the science.

But it is nothing more than an urban legend, the result of misunderstood and distorted science.

The legend even finds its way into our inboxes, sent to us by concerned friends or relatives. Did you get the email called the Cancer Update, for example? It claimed to be from John Hopkins, saying sugar feeds cancer cells and suggesting people eliminate refined carbs and sugars to “starve cancer cells” and prevent the spread of cancer. It also claimed that nutritional deficiencies purportedly due to modern diets and lifestyles can cause cancer, that acidic foods like meat cause cancer, that ‘live enzymes’ in raw vegetables and various supplements can fight cancer, and that cancer is a disease of the spirit and caused by having a negative outlook.

Toddlers as young as 19 months are able to distinguish jokes from mistakes - a skill that lays the groundwork for their later ability to recognise lies and false beliefs. That’s according to Elena Hoicka and Merideth Gattis, who tested a large group of children aged between 19 and 36 months.

Children were asked to copy actions made by the researcher - for example stirring a spoon in a cup, or combing their hair. Next, the researcher performed a range of joke actions (e.g. putting a boot on their hand), which they did laughing, and mistakes (e.g. putting a lid on a sugar jar so that it was not quite in place), after which they said “oops!”.

All the children, from 19 months upwards, copied the joke actions, but corrected the mistakes - a sign, the researchers said, that they were able to tell the difference between a mistake and a joke.

After this, things got trickier. The researchers performed actions that could either be interpreted as a mistake or a joke: for example, putting a hat on so that it covered their eyes, or brushing their teeth with the wrong end of the brush. Half the time the researchers laughed afterwards, the rest of the time they said “oops!” The idea is that the ambiguous nature of the actions meant that, to know if a joke or mistake had occurred, the children had to be able to interpret the researcher’s vocal response.

This time an age-difference emerged. The proportion of occasions that the 19 to 24-month-olds copied or corrected these actions did not vary according to whether the researcher laughed or said “oops!”. By contrast, the children aged 25 months and upwards, corrected more when the researcher said “oops!” and copied more when they performed the action laughing - a sign, the researchers said, that children of this age are able to distinguish humorous intent from mistakes.